The Disaster in Louisiana Is Emblematic of a Much Bigger Problem

"Trey Poirrier and Jerry Gravois stood in waist-deep floodwater near the St. Amant Fire Department Monday morning trying, unsuccessfully, to reach a relative's waterlogged home. Nearby, caskets were floating around the Methodist church. Volunteer boaters sailed by them with a rescued family of five, including three girls young enough to attend close-by Lake Primary School, also under water."

As, once again, the citizens of Louisiana dig out of the muck and mire of historic flooding, there are people casting about for reasons why the disaster was as bad as it was. As the water recedes, blame rushes in. But, thanks to some fine work by Steve Hardy and David Mitchell of The Baton Rouge Advocate, whose lede we shared above, we get a glimpse at one lost chance to mitigate at least some of the damage.

There have been other visions for the Amite River Basin—the main culprit in the catastrophe. As early as the 1970s, officials talked about drainage improvements, and their voices got louder after the horrific flood of 1983. A canal would redirect high water from the Comite River through Baker and into the Mississippi River. A dam and reservoir would hold back the flow of the Amite in East Feliciana and St. Helena. Levees would protect Denham Springs. Three decades later, Ascension Parish has built several drainage pumps, levees and floodgates, but the big, federal projects have been abandoned or left incomplete… Following the 1983 flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drew up several designs to improve drainage along the Amite and Comite rivers. There were some early discussions of putting levees along the Amite around Denham Springs, but the plan was deemed impractical, said Dietmar Rietschier, executive director of the Amite River Basin Commission. Instead, officials focused on digging the canal and creating a reservoir on the Amite near Darlington, by the Mississippi state line. However, that project has also since been abandoned.

As Hardy and Mitchell make clear, there's enough blame to go around. There's overbuilding in the floodplain, a problem endemic in almost all parts of Louisiana. There was some undeniable NIMBY-ism involved; people didn't trust the proposed reservoir believing it would result in their being moved off their land for the purposes of building a tourist destination.

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Getty ImagesJoe Raedle

After interminable wrangling over environmental regulations, the federal government seems simply to have forgotten about the canal project entirely. The Army Corps of Engineers, not the most popular operation in Louisiana on its best day, thought it too expensive. The local leaders in Ascension Parish seem to have done a terrific job on their own, but even they weren't ready for the once-in-a-millennium event that hit them this month.

After running afoul of the Corps over digging out bayous without permits and years of political wrangling, the last major piece of the system envisioned by the parish's master plan, the Henderson Bayou floodgate, was finished nearly two years ago. The gates and a connected 14-foot-high levee are designed to stop water in the Amite River from flowing upstream into Henderson Bayou and flooding the Galvez area. Like many aspects of the parish system, the floodgate and levee were pegged to the historic crest of the Amite at Port Vincent in 1983 at 14.65 feet. In engineering the new system, Ascension officials designed it to withstand a repeat of the 1983 flood, partly because it was the all-time maximum flood, but also due to the cost of building something even more robust. But last week's flooding pushed the all-time record nearly three feet higher, to 17.5 feet, on the Amite at Port Vincent. About 19,000 homes and businesses flooded in Ascension alone, and the devastation was underscored Thursday night in an emotional Parish Council meeting, where several members held back tears while expressing their feelings of loss and appreciation.

It's a complex but common story in this time in which it's easier to engineer governmental paralysis than it is to engineer public policy to address even the most obvious major problem—in this case, the fact that Louisiana floods. Period. That should be obvious even to the most brain-dead system of government.

There are critical environmental needs going unaddressed all over the country. This is just one of them.

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